Gilad Atzmon: Shoah Backfires

For years Israelis and Zionists have been pumping 'Shoah' into our veins by using every possible propaganda outlet: media, education, Hollywood, music, literature, billboards and so on.

Seemingly they have been very successful : We are all properly ' Holocausted '. We accept the suffering of the Jewish people -- and we have even managed to draw a universal message from it all.

We do accept that a real Shoah is taking place in front of our eyes in Palestine, where the Jewish state locks millions of Palestinians behind bars: it starves them, it stops medical supplies, food, cement, and educational materials from getting in. But it does not stop there -- when the Jewish state feels like it, it also kills Palestinians indiscriminately. It either blitzes them with white phosphorous , or sends in its tank battalions to drive over Gaza.

The Jewish paper insists that the Shoah -- like Israel -- is a ‘Jews only club’. They do not want to 'let anyone else in'.

Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust told the Jewish paper, "Using the word 'Shoah' in this context is done with the sole intention of causing offence to Holocaust survivors, their families and the wider Jewish community and shows the greatest possible disrespect to the tragedy of the Holocaust."

I would fiercely argue that Pollock is wrong. Using the word 'Shoah' in this very context is there to awaken the world, the Jews, and holocaust victims in particular, to the fact that the biggest current perpetrator of crimes against humanity -- is actually the Jewish state.

Mark Gardner, of the Community Security Trust, said: "This website is yet another sickening example of how the Holocaust is perverted by anti-Zionists in order to attack Israel and Zionism."

Mark Gardner is almost correct; anti Zionists do indeed use the Shoah as a means of mirroring. And it is now an accepted fact that the Palestinians are the last victims of Hitler. It is also becoming accepted that the Israelis are the Nazis of our time. And tragically enough, the crimes in Palestine carried out by the Jewish state are also being committed in the name of the Jewish people. As if this is not enough, it is Jewish pilots who drop white phosphorus from planes which are decorated with Jewish symbols.

These facts are disturbing and demand the immediate attention of world Jewry.

Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies ( another morbid institute that claims to represent British Jews ) told the Jewish Chronicle that "even without delving into what is clearly a one-sided and skewed narrative, by virtue of its title, this website is extremely provocative and any trivialisation of the Holocaust in which over six million Jewish men, women, and children were systematically murdered is completely abhorrent."

Benjamin is probably too lame to grasp that what we see here is the total opposite -- We are actually witnessing an acceptance of an astute universalising of the holocaust as carrying a humanist message for all of us. We can see a deeper understanding of the true moral meaning of that historical event.

Surely we need to stand up against all forms of ethno-centric homicidal policies. And it seems clear that Israel is no different from Nazi Germany in that regard. In fact Israel is far worse, because Israel acts under the guise of being a democracy, and its merciless policies are a reflection of the majority Israeli population's yearning to live in a 'Jews only' state.

However, a few questions are still left open -- Why exactly do the aforementioned Jews from the Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Deputies want to maintain the notion and reality of historical suffering as being exclusively Jewish property? Why don’t they want anyone else to use the word 'Shoah'? Why do they demand a total control over the usage of words and applications of meanings ?

Can you imagine a Ukrainian protesting against the word 'famine' being applied to the situation in Ethiopia?

I really wonder why so many Jews insist on grounding their identity politics on suffering and being hated by others?

For clearly, one must admit that being loathed is not exactly something to brag about.

I am bewildered.

(1) It is interesting to read the definition of the Holocaust Memorial Day on the official HMD's site:

"HMD is about remembering the victims and those whose lives have been changed beyond recognition of the Holocaust, Nazi persecution and subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and the ongoing atrocities today in Darfur."